Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1996, died this week. (Her obit is in this morning's L.A. Times – 2/3/12 – and in yesterday's N.Y. Times.)  I have two of her books, View With a Grain of Sand; Selected Poems and Monologue of a Dog, and I've been sitting here this morning rereading her poems, poems that can stop your heart. Google "Cat in an Empty Apartment"  and read the translation that begins:

        Die – you can't do that to a cat.

        Since what can a cat do

        in an empty apartment? 

Her poems are simple and plain and deep, and a number of them are very funny. Billy Collins wrote in an introduction to one of her books: "Her simple, relaxed language dares to let us know exactly what she is thinking…we are led, almost unaware, into the intriguing and untranslatable realms that lie just beyond the boundaries of speech."